Wargame

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Wargaming Korea: 1950-1953

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Wargaming Korea: 1950-1953

Partly inspired by some potential changes in my own life and partly because this year marks the tenth anniversary since my grandfather passed away, I’ve found myself with a newfound interest in the Korean War. I’m resisting the urge to turn this into a research/game project of a similar scale to We Intend to Move on Your Works, but I intend to at least dip my toe in and I would like to have a little structure as I dive deeper. With that goal in mind, I recently read The Coldest Winter and I’ve a short reading list to tackle over the rest of this year. In terms of games, I’m focusing only on operational games that look at the whole Korean peninsula – nothing tactical for the moment. I don’t want this to balloon into a huge life consuming project, so I’m only planning to play at most a handful of games.

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Stonewall Jackson’s Way II (GCACW) by Joseph M. Balkoski, Ed Beach, Mike Belles, and Chris Withers

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Stonewall Jackson’s Way II (GCACW) by Joseph M. Balkoski, Ed Beach, Mike Belles, and Chris Withers

Few wargame systems have as much veneration from their fans as the Great Campaigns of the Civil War. However, despite its dedicated fans it still manages to feel somewhat obscure - a series that is often out of print and intimidating for new players to get into. For those in the know, this system has been a touchstone of the hobby since Stonewall Jackson’s Way was published by Avalon Hill in 1992. The series was originally designed by Joe Balkoski until 2001. When Avalon Hill’s catalog was bought up by Hasbro the series was taken up by Multi-Man Publishing (MMP) who worked with other designers (including Chris Withers and Ed Beach) to update the old Avalon Hill games into new editions with revised rules and graphics.

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Preview: Rebel Fury by Mark Herman

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I was lucky enough to be invited by Fred Serval to be his opponent for an early preview of the final version of Mark Herman’s latest American Civil War game: Rebel Fury. We played the Chickamauga scenario, which Mark recommends as the best starting point in terms of length and complexity. Rebel Fury expands on his game Gettysburg, originally published in C3i Magazine, but has a few neat changes. The combat system has been pretty substantially overhauled, with more factors to consider around unit positioning and support between units, but the change I liked most was how headquarters now have to postures they can assume, one which benefits them in battle but limits their command range and one that allows for a wider range of movement but cannot add a DRM in battle. This is a promising looking system and I’m keen to try more. You can see our full play through of the first two turns (just under half a full game) of Chickamauga here:

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Most Anticipated Games: 2024 Edition

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Most Anticipated Games: 2024 Edition

I have been hesitant in the past to write about my excitement for upcoming games, partly out of a fear of getting absorbed into the Cult of the New but more so because it can be very hard to know when a given game might come out. The publication pipeline is at best vague and there is always the risk of delays or unexpected interruptions to production. I find it easier to not get too excited about games until I can grab them with my spindly hands. Still, I am not immune to hype and this year I thought I’d indulge myself a little and write about the ten games I’m most looking forward to that should be coming out in 2024. As an addendum, to show that I’m not all about that new cardboard smell, I’ve also added a list of the five games I already own that I am the most excited to hopefully get to the table this year.

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2023 in Review and My Top 8 Games of the Year*

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2023 in Review and My Top 8 Games of the Year*

I’ve now been running this blog for two whole years, but somehow it feels a lot longer. I’ve been very pleased with how it has grown over the past year and I’m hoping to continue that growth going into 2024. I received several review copies of games this year which was really gratifying and allowed me to cover games that would otherwise have probably been beyond my budget - wargame blogging is not particularly lucrative. To mark the end of the year I want to reflect a bit on how I feel the last two years have gone and then, of course, provide my top ten games of the year. As per last year’s list, these will be games that I played for the first time in 2023 not necessarily games that were released in 2023 (although unlike last year this year’s list does is that were released during the year).

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Review - Mosby’s Raiders by Eric Lee Smith

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Review - Mosby’s Raiders by Eric Lee Smith

There are too many solitaire games where you play as the Confederacy. By my count there are at least seven. In contrast, I have found only one dedicated solitaire game where you play the Union. I find this imbalance a little distressing, and since I’m doing a project on the Lost Cause in American Civil War games, I think it behooves me to play some of them. I have previously reviewed Ben Madison’s Jeff Davis, and this week I’m going back in time forty years to what must be the first game in this suspect genre: Mosby’s Raiders by Eric Lee Smith. It would be a bit of an understatement to say that this game has something of a legacy. Eric Lee Smith was a co-designer on Ambush!, one of the original solitaire wargames, and also designed The Civil War 1861-65, potentially the most influential strategic game on the American Civil War. The confluence of an influential solo and ACW designer making a solitaire ACW game is certainly worthy of attention. What I found in Mosby’s Raiders was an interesting game portraying some less interesting history.

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Review - Longstreet Attacks by Hermann Luttmann

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Review - Longstreet Attacks by Hermann Luttmann

Few names loom larger in the, for lack of a better word, wargame-ology of current American Civil War games than Hermann Luttmann. A Most Fearful Sacrifice, his enormous game on the full battle of Gettysburg, has won countless awards and is easily among the most talked about games of 2022. Before that he was widely known for his Blind Swords system, which includes several battles from the Franco-Prussian War but is dominated by American Civil War games. Seeing as I am currently undertaking a tour of ACW designs it was inevitable that I would play a few Luttmann designs. As my entry point into the ludography of Luttmann I selected Longstreet Attacks. This wasn’t because I thought it to be the best entry into the system, many people have said it is not, but rather a choice based on the game’s subject. I wanted to play something Gettysburg to mark the 160th anniversary back in July and I thought playing a game about the second day on the 2nd of July would be appropriate. I managed to approximately time the beginning of my game with the timing of the famous attack, but the actual playing of the game took a fair bit longer than Longstreet’s disastrous assault did. I also think the figure of Longstreet and his position in the Lost Cause myth is an interesting one, and something that is very germane to my project.

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Teach and Play of Antietam 1862 by Grant Wylie

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Teach and Play of Antietam 1862 by Grant Wylie

Hot on the heels of my initial review of The Seven Days Battles, I joined Fred Serval to play an introductory game of Antietam 1862 - the first game in the same series. We played a quick game of the Bloody Lane scenario, a very small and quick playing introductory experience. We also chatted about our thoughts on the series as well as a variety of other games. You can watch the video below:

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Initial Impressions - Seven Days Battles by Grant Wylie

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Initial Impressions - Seven Days Battles by Grant Wylie

While arguably one of the most important battles of the American Civil War, the Seven Days Battles have not really ingrained themselves into our popular consciousness the same way battles like Chancellorsville or Gettysburg have. There are no doubt many factors that explain this, but I would hazard that one of them is that the Seven Days sits in an awkward middle between being more than one battle but not quite a full campaign. From a game perspective it also presents an interesting challenge to design for. The Seven Days, as the name suggests, was a series of battles covering a week of combat. During the Seven Days, Robert E. Lee, recently appointed to command of the Army of Northern Virginia, lead a series of aggressive attacks on the Union army of George McClellan which was stationed just outside of Richmond. Lee’s army suffered horrific casualties, but, thanks in part to McClellan’s own fears about Confederate military strength, it was able to drive the Union army back to the coast of Virginia. My initial expectation was that the battle would work best at an operational scale, which lead to me playing The Late Unpleasantness, which I found… underwhelming. Now I’m taking my second shot at the Seven Days Battles but this time as a hex and counter tactical game thanks to the latest entry in Worthington’s Civil War Brigade Battle Series.

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Arquebus: Fornovo 1495 by Richard Berg

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Arquebus: Fornovo 1495 by Richard Berg

It’s been a while since I played Men of Iron and I’d been been hankering to try some more Arquebus so I took a break from playing a small mountain of American Civil War hex and counter games for a brief holiday in sixteenth-century Italy. I decided to try the Fornovo scenario for the very boring reason that it was the first battle in the play book and I’m glad I did because this is probably one of the most interesting Men of Iron scenarios I have ever played. It reminded me of everything I really like about Men of Iron, as well as some of the elements of the system that I don’t think work so well. Those wrinkles weren’t enough to stop me from enjoying Fornovo a lot and putting it high on my list of scenarios I want to try again.

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Review - 1914: Nach Paris

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Review - 1914: Nach Paris

I played 1914 Nach Paris in something of a frenzy over the month of March and early April. Finishing a game one evening, setting up the next scenario and playing that the following night. It dominated my little gaming corner, pushing everything else to the edges. Night after night I struggled to learn to swim in this complex operational hex and counter game about the opening weeks of the Western Front of World War I, designed by Bertrand Munier and published by Vuca Simulations. That I played this so many times should give some indication about how much I’ve enjoyed my time with 1914: Nach Paris but this is a huge box and there’s a lot to unpack, both literally and in terms of the experience it offers. I hope you’ll bear with me for what will prove to be a meandering review through the pre-trench warfare of 1914 Northern France.

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We Intend to Move on Your Works - The Lost Cause in Games on the American Civil War: A Project

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We Intend to Move on Your Works - The Lost Cause in Games on the American Civil War: A Project

I am a scion of the Great Commonwealth of Virginia, the Old Dominion, and the son of an avowed Civil War buff so you can probably imagine that my childhood featured a lot of information about the American Civil War. In School I didn’t learn any history after 1865 until I was fourteen. The period between Jamestown and the end of the Civil War was the high point of Virginian hegemony and the school system was perfectly happy to dwell within that temporal space for as long as possible. During my childhood I was frequently taken to battlefields to play - I’ve been to Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Gettysburg, and many smaller sites more times than I can count. I even have a favourite obscure American Civil War site (it’s the Confederate Breastworks in West Augusta County, Virginia - although more for its scenic views and lovely hiking trail than its historical importance). Few historical events loomed as large in my life as the American Civil War and this has given me a complicated relationship with it.

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Review - Nevsky by Volko Ruhnke

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Review - Nevsky by Volko Ruhnke

I must confess to feeling some trepidation when I wrote in my review of Almoravid that while I liked Levy and Campaign’s Iberian excursion, for me the original Baltic flavour was superior. You see, at time of writing I had just wrapped up several months of playing Almoravid and I hadn’t so much as opened Nevsky in weeks let alone played it. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was viewing my experiences with rose tinted glasses. After all, I’d only played a few games of Nevsky, all of them solitaire, and hadn’t even written a review of the game. I was thus very excited when news came out that Rally the Troops would be adding Nevsky as the site’s next game. Now I could finally give it the thorough exploration it warranted and determine with certainty whether the sentiments I felt so keenly after playing Almoravid were still true months later. I’m happy to report that they are! While I do have some quibbles with Nevsky, which we’ll get to, I’ve fallen in love with it all over again and found new depths to its design that I hadn’t appreciated before.

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First Impressions - 1212 Las Navas de Tolosa by Pablo Sanz

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First Impressions - 1212 Las Navas de Tolosa by Pablo Sanz

1212 Las Navas de Tolosa is immediately visually arresting with a fabulous aesthetic inspired by medieval manuscript art. This aesthetic alone was enough to make me look twice but what really got my attention is how the game is powered by a deck of only nine cards. I love games with small decks - I’m a huge fan of the ever popular Japanese microgame Love Letter - and I was really interested to see how the principles of a small deck could be applied to a fairly abstract wargame. I’m also always on the lookout for short games, especially ones I can either carry around with me. Don’t get me wrong, I love an all day gaming session but these days I rarely have the time or energy for that. Great aesthetics, interesting mechanism, and a short playtime was a trifecta I just knew I had to get to the table. Despite it’s short playtime it took me a while to get it to the table as real life got in the way of in person gaming, but I finally played it and I had a really great time. As usual, I have a few thoughts.

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Sherwood by Buxeria

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Sherwood by Buxeria

Sherwood is the latest entry in the venerable Cry Havoc system - a man to man hex and counter game of medieval warfare released by French publisher Historic-One with a legacy stretching back to the early 1980s. The system has undergone several revisions over the past decade, modernising the design and making it more approachable for new players. I’ve had my eye on it for a while since I’m always interested in anything medieval but never quite pulled the trigger on any of the recent releases. However, when I saw Sherwood I decided that this might be the perfect time to take the plunge. Sherwood aims to be an introductory volume to the series, with simplified rules to introduce the system’s core concepts but without the same detail. The core rules have been reduced to just five pages and there is even a single page “basic rules” option for playing with children.

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First Impressions: Gandhi by Bruce Mansfield

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First Impressions: Gandhi by Bruce Mansfield

I’ve enjoyed every entry in the COIN series that I have played so far. However, I also know that there is no way I could ever own every game in the series - my small European home cannot accommodate them let alone my hectic life. This means that I have spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating which entries in the series I would like to keep on my shelves, playing over and over again, and which I’m happy just experiencing once or twice via someone else’s copy. Pendragon is definitely staying on my shelf for the time being - it’s so different from the rest of the series and I’m a big fan of its late antique/early medieval setting. However, after much debate I decided to trade Andean Abyss away. I enjoyed it and it was very useful for helping me learn (and teach) the system, but my friends didn’t seem to like it as much as I did and playing A Distant Plain made me realise I wanted something a little different. However, I didn’t want to buy my own copy of A Distant Plain because its subject is a little too grim for me to want to play it more than a few times, no matter how much I liked the gameplay. After much internal debate, I decided to pick up Gandhi as my next COIN game. Gandhi’s new non-violent factions and other deviations from the core COIN formula intrigued me but if I’m honest the main appeal of Gandhi lay in two aspects: it isn’t really about war and the short scenario is supposed to be quite good.

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Revisiting Commands and Colors: Ancients by Richard Borg

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Revisiting Commands and Colors: Ancients by Richard Borg

I played a lot of Commands and Colors: Ancients in college - I convinced the board game society to buy the base game and its first two expansions and for my enthusiasm I was tasked with stickering all three boxes! Luckily I love putting stickers on wooden blocks, so I didn’t mind in the slightest. After I graduated, though, I didn’t play it nearly as much because I didn’t own my own copy and it was harder to borrow the society’s copy when I was no longer an undergraduate (as a post-grad I could be a member but I rarely had the time for hanging around that I used to).

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First Impressions - Fire and Stone Siege of Vienna by Robert DeLeskie

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First Impressions - Fire and Stone Siege of Vienna by Robert DeLeskie

If the fact that I spent a month playing every game I could find on the 1565 Siege of Malta didn’t give it away, I have a bit of a thing for games about sieges. I think siege warfare is a fascinating and often underrepresented aspect of military history. In my own topic of study sieges were far more numerous and more important than set piece battles but it is the battles that most people have heard of. When it comes to game design battles again dominate, with siege games being relatively few and far between, but I am sympathetic to designers faced with the challenge of making a truly engaging siege game. It is precisely because it is so challenging, though, that I am interested in seeing how game designers approach siege games My fascination with siege games meant that naturally I would be interested in Fire and Stone Siege of Vienna, and it definitely didn’t hurt that the game is gorgeous. That’s why I was very pleased to be invited to be taught the game by the designer and play against Fred Serval on the Homo Ludens YouTube channel. The full video is embedded below and I would recommend watching it, but I also thought I’d give some of my thoughts now that I’ve had time to meditate on my first play of Fire and Stone.